TERRAFORMING TERRA
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Friday, April 27, 2012

Practical Asteroid Mining

Some folks cannot resist a press release. On top of that the economics of the material
is only hinted at and as on earth, all that glitters does not pay. If every other aspect of this adventure were paid for, I would still view it all as a suspect idea right up there with
extracting gold from sea water.

However, what are the practical issues and what is possible. A metalliferous asteroid will be substantial
and perhaps several hundred feet through.
We will assume such has been located and studied and found suitable.

The first step will be to cut a shaft through the asteroid while
retaining the produced material. A
mining work void will also be cut in the center for future mining. This provides a fully protected work space
and a location for the energy plant and human operators.

At this point an induction mass driver is placed in the shaft and
powered up. Two things are planned
for. The first is that produced mass can
be flung toward Earth on a planned geodesic.
The second is that the repetitive firing is able to slowly alter the
orbit of the asteroid which can also be useful.

One method that is worth considering is to fire the slugs directly
through the atmosphere at a steep angle and into the ocean at one of several
collection stations. The ocean should be
able to burn off the kinetic energy without breaking up the slug allowing easy
retrieval from the ocean bottom.

It would be pretty spectacular to watch from a nearby observation
point.

There’s gold in them there
hills. You know, those ones floating around in space. Asteroids contain many
tons of precious metals, making them irresistible to scientists, aerospace
engineers, futurists, fiction writers … and tech billionaires.

A group of wealthy,
adventurous entrepreneurs will announce on Apr. 24 a new venture
called Planetary Resources, Inc., which plans to send swarms of robots to
space to scout asteroids for precious metals and set up mines to bring
resources back to Earth, in the process adding trillions of dollars to the
global GDP, helping ensure humanity’s prosperity and paving the way for the
human settlement of space.

“The resources of Earth pale
in comparison to the wealth of the solar system,” said Eric Anderson, who
founded the commercial space tourism company Space Adventures, and is
co-founder of a new company along with Peter Diamandis, who started the X
Prize foundation, which offers prize-based incentives for advanced technology
development.

Nearly 9,000
asteroids larger than 150 feet in diameter orbit near the Earth. Some
could contain as much platinum as is mined in an entire year on Earth, making
them potentially worth several billion dollars each. The right kinds of investment
could reap huge rewards for those willing to take the risk.

Outside of NASA, Anderson and
Diamandis are among the most likely candidates to realize such a dream. Space
Adventures has sent seven private tourists to the International Space Station
while the Ansari X Prize led to a spurt of non-governmental manned spaceships.

“We have a long track record
of making large-scale space ventures real,” said Diamandis.

Despite the promise of
astronomical profits, the long time-scales and uncertain return on asteroid
mining has historically driven most investors away from such undertakings. But
the new company is also backed by a number of other billionaire luminaries,
including Google’s CEO Larry Page and executive chairman Eric Schmidt, former
Microsoft chief architect Charles Simonyi, and Ross Perot
Jr. The venture also counts on filmmaker James Cameron, former
astronaut Tom Jones, former JPL engineer Chris Lewicki, and planetary
scientist Sara Seager as advisers.

Still, this new undertaking
will be much larger and more ambitious than anything Anderson and Diamandis
have attempted before. The hurdles are many and high. While the endeavor is
technically feasible, the technology has not yet been developed. And beyond
their initial steps, the details of Planetary Resources’ plans remain scarce.

The first hurdle will likely
be ensuring that Planetary Resources has covered all its legal bases. While
some have argued that governments need to set up specific property
rights before investors will make use of space, the majority of space
lawyers agree that this isn’t necessary to assure the opportunity for a return
on investment, said space policy analyst Henry Hertzfeld at George
Washington University in Washington D.C. Mining occurs in international seabeds
— even without specific property rights — overseen by a special commission
dedicated to the task, he said. A similar arrangement would likely work in
space.

In terms of extraction,
Planetary Resources hopes to go after the platinum-group metals —
which include platinum, palladium, osmium, and iridium — highly valuable
commodities used in medical devices, renewable energy products, catalytic
converters, and potentially in automotive fuel cells.

Platinum alone is worth
around $23,000 a pound — nearly the same as gold. Mining the top
few feet of a single modestly sized, half-mile-diameter asteroid could
yield around 130 tons of platinum, worth roughly $6 billion.

Within the next 18 to 24
months, Planetary Resources hopes to launch between two and five space-based telescopes
at an estimated cost of a few million dollars each that will identify
potentially valuable asteroids. Other than their size and orbit, little
detailed information is available about the current catalog of near-Earth
asteroids. Planetary Resources’Arkyd-101 Space Telescopes will figure out
whether any are worth the trouble of resource extraction.

Within five to seven years,
the company hopes to send out a small swarm of similar spacecraft for a more
detailed prospecting mission, mapping out a valuable asteroid in detail and
identifying rich resource veins. They estimate such a mission will cost between
$25 and 30 million.

The next step — using robots
to remotely mine, possibly refine ore, and return material to Earth safely — is
probably the toughest phase, and Planetary Resources is still tight-lipped
about its plans here.

This is an unprecedented
challenge — the only asteroid material ever returned to Earth comes from the
Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa spacecraft, which successfully returned a
few hundred dust particles from asteroid 25143 Itokawa in 2010.

One possibility might be to
find a useful asteroid and push it closer to Earth. A fairly low-power
solar-electric ion engine could nudge a hunk of rock into orbit around the
Earth, effectively creating a small second moon that could be easily accessed.

A recent white
paper (.pdf) written by a team of scientists and engineers for the Keck
Institute for Space Studies looked at exactly this proposition in order to use
an asteroid for scientific and manned exploration. The team concluded that the
technology exists, though such a plan would need at least $2.6 billion in
funding. If Planetary Resources went this route, it would rack up a large
initial investment, which doesn’t include actually mining and returning
material back to Earth, potentially adding many hundreds more millions of
dollars.

“It’s one thing to understand
the mining and refining processes and another thing to actually build it,” said
JPL engineer John Brophy, who co-authored the paper. “And everything in space
tends to be harder than you think it will be.”

Another option to simplify the
process might be to bring the ore back to Earth for refining, though that
presents its own set of challenges. Say for the sake of argument that
you send a 5,500-pound robot (roughly the weight of a small car) to an asteroid
and it can mine and carry back 100 times its own weight in asteroid material.
On most asteroids, chopping up a one-ton chunk of regolith will generate less
than an ounce of platinum. Even asteroids with the highest concentration of
platinum yield only about two ounces of platinum per ton.

This means that with the
current commodity prices, each of your robot miners will generate about
$875,000, even on an asteroid with the highest platinum amounts. Given a
mission cost that is at least hundreds of millions of dollars, it wouldn’t be
advantageous to refine ore on Earth.

There are also unknown
financial aspects of a successful asteroid mining operation. The sudden influx
of hundreds of tons of platinum into Earth’s economy would certainly drive the
commodity’s price down. Looking at historical analogues, the enormous gold and
silver reserves the Spanish inherited from their New World conquests led
to terrible inflation and possibly the decline of their empire.

But Planetary Resources sees a
platinum price drop as one of its potential goals.

“I would be overjoyed as a
company if we brought back so much platinum that the price fell by a factor of
20 or 50,” said Anderson.

Aluminum was incredibly
expensive in the 1800s, before new technology allowed it to be easily separated
from its ore, said Diamandis. Today, aluminum is used in hundreds of
applications, something that Anderson and Diamandis would like to see happen to
the platinum-group metals.

While mining platinum and
other rare metals is Planetary Resource’s way of bringing wealth to Earth, the
world still has ample reserves of such material — South African platinum mines
alone are expected to produce for another 300 years.

“In my view, its questionable
how the economics of asteroid-retrieval works if you’re going to bring it to
the ground,” said Brophy. “It makes more sense if you’re going to use the
materials in space.”

Asteroids contain one
substance that is of extremely high value for astronauts: water. Water can be
used for drinking and it can be broken into its constituents. Oxygen is
valuable for life support in space-based habitats, while liquid oxygen and
hydrogen are both used to produce rocket fuel.

Rather than having to lug all
the fuel for a mission out of Earth’s deep gravity well — an expensive
proposition — having a “gas station” in space could help enable missions to
Mars and beyond. Such a refueling depot might allow people to permanently live
and work in space, another goal of Planetary Resources.

Of course, this creates a sort
of chicken-and-egg problem. Do you generate tons of resources for your
nonexistent space civilization first or do you get your space civilization
started and then utilize the available resources?

Wired Science’s resident space
historian David S. Portree thinks asteroid mining might make more
sense when we have a more established space-based habitats with a different
economy and better technology.

“Right now it would be like a
big oil tanker dropping anchor off the coast of medieval England,” he said.
“The medieval English might identify the oil as a useful commodity, but
wouldn’t be able use enough to profit the tanker crew. Heck, they wouldn’t know
how to get it off the tanker, except in wooden pails and rowboats.”

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18 years old, having cleaned out my HS library, I concluded the only ambition worth having was becoming a great genius. An inner voice cheered. Yet it is my path I have shared much to the Human Gesalt. Mar 2017 - 4.56 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM. Sep 2010 -My essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in Relativity. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data, record impressions, interpretations and to introduce new insights to readers.